Animals on a modern factory farm lead lives of unimaginable suffering and die cruel deaths in order to end up on the dinner table. Intense competition drives farmers to value profits and efficiency over the animals natural desires or quality of life.

Animals are squeezed into ever smaller living quarters, even as new biotechnology is used to make animals grow bigger and produce more meat, milk or eggs. Lowering the cost per unit is the overriding goal.

FACTORY FARMED PIGS

There is no sunshine, no liberty, or freedom, or joy for farmed pigs; there is only suffering and misery from the day they are born to the day they die.Many people who know pigs compare them to dogs because they are friendly, loyal, and intelligent - they have the mental intelligence of a three year old child.

Pigs spend their entire lives in cramped, filthy warehouses, under constant stress from the intense confinement and denied everything that is natural to them. As piglets, they are taken away from their mothers when they are less than 1 month old, their tails are cut off, some of their teeth are cut off, and the males have their testicles ripped out of their scrotums (castration), all without any pain relief.

They spend their entire lives in overcrowded pens on a tiny slab of filthy concrete. Breeding sows spend their entire miserable lives in tiny metal crates where they can't even turn around. Shortly after giving birth, they are once again forcibly impregnated. This cycle continues for years until their bodies finally give out and they are sent to be killed. When the time comes for slaughter, these beautiful and sensitive animals are forced onto transport trucks to travel to be slaughtered.

BATTERY HENS

Start by imagining a space not much bigger than the computer screen you’re looking at right now. Smaller in size than an A4 sheet of paper. Now, imagine trying to fit a whole adult chicken inside that space, and keeping her there for her entire life. You don’t even have to imagine a perch or nest, as a hen in a battery cage wouldn’t have these either.Then, imagine that same hen is in a wire cage with four other hens, and surrounded by hundreds, thousands, millions of other hens just like her.

That’s how many hens are living in this situation in Australia right now; over 12.5 million hens producing more than 193 million eggs each year. They will never be able to walk around, peck or bathe in the dust, stretch or flap their wings. If this was a dog or a cat, this would be illegal. Yet these hens continue to suffer, every minute, of every hour, of every day in battery farms all over Australia.

Each year 550 million chickens are produced for meat in Australia and most are factory farmed. They live in close confinement with up to 60,000 chickens in a single shed, never stepping outside.

The conservative Australian Chicken Meat Federation describes most commercial meat chicken farms as “intensive, highly mechanised operations that occupy relatively small areas compared with other forms of farming.” I think this defines how chickens are treated by the industry itself as objects rather than living, breathing beings.

Chickens are harshly denied their natural behaviour in factory farms. They live in extremely close confinements with tens of thousands of other birds with personal space less than the size of an A4 paper. Standing on their on their own faeces, with no sunlight they are unable to perform some of their most fundamental behaviour’s such as roosting and nurturing their young.

Through selective breeding the meat industry further discomforts these sentient beings that can feel pain and emotion just like usthrough unnatural methods all in the name of money and efficiency.

By using newly developed methods chickens are made to grow faster than ever. Over 50 years ago it took 98 days to reach slaughter weight. Today it takes just 35 days.

The consequences of rapid body growth to factory farmed chickens are broken bones, swollen joints, acute heart failure and spinal damage causing unimaginable pain. Some chickens even grow so heavy due to their unnaturally large breast muscles they can hardly move, crouching in corrosive wet litter and develop painful breast blisters.

Their death is not much better but slow and inhumane. After being brought of the trucks the birds are shackled upside down into metal stirrups on an overhead conveyor. The conveyor carries them through an electrified bath that is intended to stun them but several terrified birds lift their heads when they reach an automatic slaughtering knife and some birds even miss this too and are agonized by being lowered into a 50 degree scalding tank to help remove their feathers.

On top of this farm animals such as chickens are not protected under law but are “regulated” by a moral code of practice made up by the meat industry. This is no surprise seeing that animals are legally classified as property under Australian law.

Just don’t eat chickens.

FISH

Scientists have proved conclusively that fish feel pain. The idea that fish don't feel any pain is ridiculous - they have a brain, a nervous system, pain receptors and are very sensitive to slight changes in water temperature and pressure. When under stress and faced with dangerous situations, they display symptoms including pounding heartbeat, fast breathing, adrenaline rush, writhing and gasping. The Farm Animal Welfare Council Report on the Welfare of Farmed Fish states:

"The fact that fish are cold-blooded does not prevent them from having a pain system and, indeed, such a system is valuable in preserving life and maximising the biological fitness of individuals. The receptor cells, neuronal pathways and specialised transmitter substances in the pain system are very similar in fish to those in mammals."

When hauled up from the deep, fish undergo excruciating decompression. The intense internal pressure ruptures the swimbladder, pops out the eyes and pushes the oesophagus and stomach out through the mouth. Fish caught in nets will die of crushing or suffocation, or have their bellies sliced open on the decks of the ships.

Fish farms are of two types, in-land farms and sea farms. Almost half of the salmon, 40 percent of the mollusks, and 65 percent of the freshwater fish consumed today spend most of their lives in captivity. Salmon, trout and other species are reared in dirty, cramped, underwater cages and pens. Due to overcrowding, infections and diseases spread easily. Many become ill with painful lice, which eat them alive from the outside in. The industry tries to control the lice through the use of antibiotics and toxic pesticides.

In-land farms use concrete tanks measuring up to 35 meters in length; the light and food are tightly controlled and monitored. The farms at sea consist of 70 meter diameter cages floating along the shore line at the estuaries of rivers. The fish are packed tight and confined in these cages each of which may contain more than 50,000 salmon or 270,000 trout. That’s similar to having a 2.5 foot salmon in one bathtub of water.

Salmon are typically killed by first being clubbed on the head and then having their gills cut so that they bleed to death. Many trout are condemned to a slow and agonising death by suffocation in air or on ice.

Cows produce milk for the same reason that humans do—to feed their babies.To keep giving milk, cows must be forcibly impregnated through artificial insemination every year. The cows’ babies are generally taken away within a day of being born - male calves are destined to become veal, while females are sentenced to the same fate as their mothers.

Mother cows on dairy farms can often be seen searching and calling for their babies after they have been taken away. In the U.S.A the cattle expert Dr. T. Grandin wrote of a visit that he made to a dairy farm and of the great distress of bellowing that was heard when he arrived: “They must have separated the calves from the cows this morning, there was one cow outside the stockade, roaming, looking for her calf, and bellowing, she wanted her baby. Bellowing for it, hunting for it. She stops for a while, and then starts again. It’s like grieving, mourning—not much written about it. People don’t like to allow them thoughts or feelings”.

THE MILKING PROCESS .

The mother cow will be hooked up several times a day to machines that take the milk intended for her calf. Through genetic manipulation, and intensive milking, she will produce about three times as much milk as she would naturally. According to the industry’s own figures, between 30 and 50 per cent of dairy cows suffer from mastitis, which is an extremely painful condition. A cow’s natural lifespan is 25 years, but a cow used by the dairy industry is killed after only four or five years. By the time they are killed, an industry study reports that nearly 40 percent of dairy cows are lame because of the filth, intensive confinement, and the strain of constantly being pregnant and giving milk. Dairy cows are turned into soup, companion animal food, or low-grade hamburger meat, their bodies too “spent” to be used for anything else.

A writer named Gene Franks wrote an article that was published called 'Milk Sucks - Bossies Revenge' which is a really interesting read all about the milk industry propaganda that we are raised to believe. We've picked out a few 'facts' for you to think about and although it is an American article, the facts are worth considering.

Here are several things about milk that the ads don't tell you:

1. Milk is "a natural" only for baby calves. Calves have fours stomachs and double their body weight in 47 days. Human babies have only one stomach and a much slower rate of growth. It takes human babies 180 days or so to double their weight, so they don't need nearly as much protein as calves. Cows' milk is 15% protein (it has 15% of its calories as protein); human breast milk is 5 % protein. Much of the rationale for believing that cows' milk is an ideal food for human babies was based on research done with rats early in this century. The milk of mother rats is 49% protein and baby rats double their weight in just 4 days. This is yet another example of the difficulties we create for ourselves by trying to imitate rats.

2. Continuing to drink milk into adulthood is unnatural to all species. Only man could rationalize such weird behavior and learn to view it as "natural."

3. Decades of meat and dairy propaganda have made Americans the world's most outrageous protein gluttons. The most frequent question vegetarians hear is, "Where do you get your protein?" The answer is, "Where do horses, cows, gorillas, elephants, and giraffes get their protein?" Corpse-milk-egg protein is secondhand protein, inferior in quality to plant protein. And all plants, even lettuce, have protein. Here again is George Bernard Shaw: "Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into a giant oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay! "

4. Although the officially recommended daily requirement for protein is probably more than double what we really need, government and university experts regularly advise that we take in an extra 30% or so just to be safe. More is better. When asked who needs this extra 30%, Dr. David Reuben, who popularized the importance of dietary fiber, replied:

The people who sell meat, fish, cheese, eggs, chicken, and all the other high prestige and expensive sources of protein. Raising the amount of protein you eat by 30% raises their income by 30%. It also increases the amount of protein in the sewers and septic tanks of your neighborhood 30% as you merrily urinate away everything that you can't use that very _ day. It also deprives the starving children of the world of the protein that would save their lives. Incidentally, it makes you pay 30% of your already bloated food bill for protein you will never use [and] puts another $36 billion a year into the pockets of the protein producers.

5. Question: Where do people who don't drink milk get their calcium?

Answer: Where do cows get their calcium?

6. Question: Who needs the excess calcium that experts recommend?

Answer: The people who sell milk, cheese, and other high prestige and expensive sources of calcium. Raising the amount of calcium you eat by X amount raises their income by X amount.

7. Nutrition writer Frieda Kabelac says:

We have been thoroughly mis-educated about calcium and proteins, thanks to the dairy and meat interests, which have penetrated the school systems with their propaganda. So ingrained is the idea that we need milk after the weaning period for calcium that people doubt that we can get enough calcium from plant foods.

8. Calcium deficiency usually does not arise from too little calcium but from too much protein. Dr. John Scharffenberg writes:

A very high calcium intake is necessary in the United States diet because a high-protein diet increases excretion of calcium. In one study, men 18-20 years of age were given protein ranging from 48-141 gm. daily. The higher levels of protein doubled the urinary excretion of calcium when both calcium and phosphorus intake were held constant.... A diet high in meat with its high protein content will therefore increase urinary excretion of calcium.... Vegetarians have significantly greater bone density than omnivores; thus vegetarians appear to be less prone to osteoporosis.

9, The dairy industry has spent millions funding a variety of research schemes aimed at proving that milk is good for us. Meanwhile, what is probably the most extensive epidemiological study ever undertaken in the field of nutrition found, decisively, that the opposite is true.

10. If you plan to "cut down" on the fat overdose by drinking "low fat" milk, consider Bob LeRoySiBrava's advice: "Healthwise, shifting from fattier meats to 'leaner' meats, cutting skin off poultry, reducing the number of times per week you eat egg yolks, and substituting 1% milk products for most whole milk products, is comparable to cutting smoking down to one pack per day."

1 Mar 2015Great news coming out of Tasmania today. The State Government has given in-principle support for a Parliamentary Inquiry into the state's greyhound racing industry, in light of the Four Corners report.
It's the only state in Australia to make moves in this direction. Please email Jeremy Rockliff, the Deputy Premier & Racing Minister to let him know he has made the right decision! jeremy.rockliff@dpac.tas.gov.au